wa Palisades

Destination: Palisades, Mt. Rainier National Park, WA, USA Style: Hike (moderate) Distance: 3.5 miles (7 round trip) with an optional 1.2 mile (round trip) detour.

The Palisades Range

Report: An amazing, fairly easy hike in Mt. Rainier National Park.  Come in mid July and you'll be walking through fields of flowers, blue skies, mountains everywhere and never more than 5 minutes from the next amazing lake (8 in all).  Best of all, since you don't have views of Rainier on this hike it's not even that crouded usually.

You start at the hairpin turn (the one with a parking lot) on the way to Sunrise.  You drop down 1 mile or so to Sunrise Lake.

Sunrise Lake with the tip top of Rainier barely visible to the left.

The way continues, relatively level (remember, you're in Washington State, on a volcano... so "level" is very relative).  You shortly come to the amazing Clover Lake, one of the prettiest lakes in the park.

Clover Lake

There is an undeveloped trail around this lake that's worth exploring.  Next you go up for a bit to brilliant ridge views and then down, down, down to a trail junction.  If you want to bag another lake view take a left and go .6 miles (up a very steep hill) to Hidden Lake

Hidden Lake

Staying right you'll reach the Upper Palisades shortly (photo at top of page).  The trail terminates around here with more lakes, and fields of flowers.  The fields call anyone with any energy left to continue on into the "back country".  This place is amazing, especially during wild flower season in July.  Total hiking time was about 4 hours.  Remember - going in is really easy - save some energy for the climbs on the way out.

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